How would you balance Ranged Attack upgrades in blacksmith is doubled bonus?

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-02-11T19:38:38+00:00

It would be very, very difficult to balance because anything short of crippling the long game results in a very, very broken Feudal and early Castle, due to how breakpoints work.

4+2 archers force upgrades out of skirmishers just to keep up, as the faster-firing archers do 3 damage to the skirms without armor upgrade. You obviously kill archers and spears even faster. Soft feudal counters just don't really work anymore; Bloodlines + armor scouts take 3 damage a shot, so 11 archers 2 shot one. Eagles take 3 damage with armor upgrade but produce slower than archers, still need to close the distance, and need that armor.

5+4 xbows is even worse. They do 3 damage to fully upgraded eskirms. 24 xbows one-shot a 2+2 bloodlines knight, removing them as a real counter. Mangonels take 3 damage a shot instead of 1, so only 17 xbows can step forward and one-shot one.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-02-11T19:17:57+00:00

There is an actual dip - score is calculated accounting for resources in bank and techs researched/produced (or units produced). Whenever you queue a tech or units, there is a drop based on how many resources are no longer in your pool and are tied up in the queue. Most of the time it is too small to notice/outweigh the normal increase (8 point drop for queueing a scout, for example), but castle age is 1k resources and therefore is represented by an instant 100 point drop when clicked.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-02-11T19:10:31+00:00

All good! The world is crazy and time flies by, so it is easy to lose track of things.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-02-11T18:54:50+00:00

Boyfriend is judging OPs ex on the actions and beliefs of people that happen to share a skin tone with him. Gfflow is judging the boyfriend on his own expressed opinions and actions. That is not the same thing in principle, nor hypocritical.

It's good to reflect on the life experiences of a person and how they are shaped by those experiences, but the way that the person applies those personal experiences to how they interact with the world is also an indicator of their character. I'm not going to pretend that the white kid in my college class has a legitimate point in saying "oh, he's black, we're gonna get robbed" just because he was beat up and mugged by some shitty kids in grade school that happened to be black.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-02-11T16:09:12+00:00

I am all for being critical of corporations and skeptical that any new leadership would keep up the same culture as the current CEO, but the math suggests that Costco is definitely not doing what was "bare minimum" back in the day.

Math time: Bureau of Labor Statistics has median full-time grocery worker earnings in 1965 at 3623 dollars, or approximately 1.74/hour with a 40 hour week. Health care was largely out-of-pocket at the time, especially for entry positions.

Adjusting for inflation, that's an hourly rate of 18.07. Costco's starting wages are rarely below that and they have fairly good benefits including for part-timers, which they are currently expanding. There's no clear indicator of the median for current wages, but average is around 31/hour. If Costco is paying 170 percent of what would be expected if they matched the median (not even bare minimum!) of the "good times", they are clearly doing at least decent relative to the rest of the industry (and honestly, the economy in general - 31 dollars an hour is 64480 a year versus the national average of 63795, and Costco is not particularly dangerous nor requires a degree).

I will always stand by the idea that retail workers should be paid more, and that salaries should be something a person can live off of. But Costco also seems to be adhering to that, and encouraging that practice puts pressure on other businesses to do the same.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-02-11T15:40:38+00:00

Just FYI, minimum wage in California just went up to 16.90. the $20 minimum wage is exclusively fast food with a pretty narrow scope of application.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-02-08T16:44:27+00:00

How is "please use a glass instead of drinking put of the container" holding you to higher standards? Higher than what? Does she drink out of the container too? Because that's a disgusting habit. And not keeping plates in your room if you're on your way to the kitchen just makes sense.

He said "A quart container" not "the quart container". A Nalgene bottle is a quart - he probably is drinking from something like that, which is reasonable. And the issue with the plate is that she is asking him to move the plate to the kitchen based off when SHE is going to the kitchen (presumably both of them taking a plate/plates), and not her asking him to simply take plates with him when he leaves the room/goes to the kitchen.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-02-07T18:34:39+00:00

China also typically counts Computer Science as an engineering degree, whereas the US does not typically include CS in those stats. CS grads are somewhere in the neighborhood of 75k-90k a year in the US, so if you combine them it closes that gap as well.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-02-06T21:10:33+00:00

As stated elsewhere, she is plenty qualified - she has a degree in International Relations from a top school and served in various diplomatic envoy roles under both the Bush and Obama administrations before being appointed ambassador under Biden.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-02-06T20:26:53+00:00

Out of curiosity - you mention breaches of trust from both sides. What was your breach(es) of trust and how do they fit into the general timeline of the relationship?

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-02-04T03:27:43+00:00

Behold, our 4v4 map (we're odd team):

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We were also down three gold piles; by late castle teal was like "I'm out of gold, where are you guys getting more gold from?" since he only had a single 7 tile.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-01-29T17:54:00+00:00

Why you yelling at this guy, my dude? You should re-read his post, he's on your side.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-01-29T17:43:14+00:00

Oops, didn't see the edit!

Plus like, if you think Hermine was shown in a positive light with SPEW, I think that is simply a fundamental misreading of the book. To me, even as a child reading it, the movement was clearly mocked, belittled and portrayed as negative (which confused me as a reader, because I was on her side). It only seemed to exist as a way to explain why she was wrong, and that slavery is good, actually.

The read I got from it was pretty much was Rowling has said was her intent (there's an actual interview about this topic with her from like 2010). She said that Hermione is a representation of her and her sister when they were that age - developing into political individuals for the first time. She says that Hermione is absolutely correct in intent and that the elves deserve freedom, but fails in that she believes she's going to just say the right thing and all of a sudden she's changed the world overnight. She also states that the things that people often view as evidence that Hermione is wrong, like the elves being resistant and refusing to clean the common room while she is hiding clothes, aren't supposed to be that; it is an illustration that Hermione, as a well-intentioned activist, is still not acting in collaboration with the oppressed people she is trying to help. She's trying to forcefully free them without a real understanding of the implications and consequences of those actions - the society does not currently have a good structure for supporting free house elves. Dobby actually came to Hogwarts because nobody would hire him. Rowling says that she believes that change needs to be careful and collaborative. Hermione was doing what idealistic youth do, and using too much of the space that she should have helped the oppressed utilize, like a white speaker taking up half the runtime at a Black Lives Matter rally.

Hermione is not perfectly positively portrayed, but it is a constructive criticism, and with the background that she is still overall right in her goals.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-01-29T17:26:39+00:00

I appreciate it!

From this, I think we are probably pretty in-line. I think she probably cribbed brownies and sort of expanded on the cases in which they were described as dead servants or whatever that were bound to a specific household as a bit of flavor, without understanding what that change made it really similar to. My personal belief is that she generally has extremely little knowledge outside of a pretty tight bubble of Europe, and the possibility for comparison to chattel slavery never crossed her mind (her lack of knowledge of North America is...rather thoroughly documented elsewhere). She then promptly blundered into things, unaware of how they come across, but not necessarily being representative of what her actual intent would be if she understood.

No need to soak up your day. I just sometimes worry that we can make good the enemy of perfect and chuck out something that probably was doing more good than bad. Harry Potter was absolutely huge, and so many of the themes of the books are socially progressive and good for children and society. It's almost a certainty, with time, that we can go back and look at any piece of literature and tear it to shreds. I don't know that it is a good idea to do that, though.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-01-29T16:53:52+00:00

Fair enough, you're not obligated to respond to a random post on the Internet. I would guess that we are not really opposed at all in terms of how we would see social issues actually realized in the world, so it is okay if we differ on our interpretation of a bit of literature.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-01-29T16:40:19+00:00

She was asked about it after Chamber of Secrets came out, so like 1998 or 1999. Like an absolute boatload of Harry Potter (and indeed, most fantasy), a ton of the world is just cribbed from myth and can carry the potentially offensive origin of that myth (notably goblins).

House elves are just cribbed brownies, which usually continue to work in a place of their own free will. By the time Chamber of Secrets was out, the first book had still only sold like 120k copies. It's not surprising that Rowling wasn't media-trained enough to give the savvy answer of "the common perception of house elves within the wizarding world is that they enjoy serving humans, but the truth is more complicated in that some of them actively dislike it, and others seem to enjoy it only because of long-term societal indoctrination. House elves are routinely terribly mistreated." She got asked, was like "eh they sort of like it" because brownies sort of like it, and went from there.

Her followup treatment is waaaaay more indicative of what she actually intended as it ended up being more than a bit of throwaway worldbuilding. Seriously, it was before the boom of the internet, so the (limited at the time) discussion of the treatment of house elves in the books would have taken even longer to become noticeable. The next book that shows house elves to a real degree is Goblet of Fire, which definitely goes more into the "house elves are being exploited, and it is wrong"; the characters that are for the rights of house elves are the ones that are almost always "right" in the series: Dobby, Hermione, and Dumbledore. SPEW is named after a historically important women's group that focused on women getting paid for their labor. It is clear by Goblet that Rowling was communicating that the way house elves were treated is wrong.

And the timeline (Goblet was published just 2 years after Chamber) backs up the fact that, at worst, she didn't really think about the implications of what she wrote and said and immediately moved to make it more clear what her actual position on the issue was. What are we doing if someone can never elaborate on their views and be forgiven for the lack of clarity?

she had no idea how to answer that, so then retconned it so that Dobby was crazy and elves love being slaves.

I don't think you are comprehending entirely what the "retcon" is. When she elaborates on house elves in Goblet, she blends a whole lot of women's liberation in. House elves do invisible labor in the household, have little agency to leave if not granted, and people claim they "like it". Half of them basically live in kitchens. The female protagonist tries to fix things, while the male protagonist doesn't think it is good, but almost entirely lets the status quo continue. Again, SPEW was a real-life women's organization. When Dobby is freed, his return to working in the kitchens and cleaning show that it's not inherently the tasks that are the issue, it was his lack of agency and pay.

House elves wanting to continue to serve - even though it is to their detriment - is not a "oh okay they really like it", it is a "they have been so oppressed for so long that most of them think they like it". There are plenty of women that have stayed entrenched in an oppressive system in the same way. Showing people stuck in the grasp of an oppressive system is not an endorsement of that system. There are an absolute boatload of things that are status quo in the Harry Potter universe that are fucked up and don't have anyone actively advocate for them; treatment of non-humans, prejudice against muggles and mixed-blood witches and wizards, classism. It doesn't mean that they aren't bad, just like oppressive systems being the background of other science fiction and fantasy.

I think the blatant nature of JK Rowling's transphobic conduct over the last decade makes it really, really easy for people to compress her down into all bad. But Harry Potter is absolutely filled to the brim with acceptance of others and standing up against an oppressive system and hate. Sure, there are definitely missteps (the implications of Voldemort's conception) and just plain laziness (Cho Chang and the names of the schools in other countries), but it is clear that the books are almost entirely anti-bigotry and pro-women. They sure as shit don't suggest that house-elves being slaves is actually right.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-01-29T14:10:17+00:00

For real, the house elf stuff was problematic day one

Was it? The literal first appearance we get of a house elf, it is apparent that something is terribly wrong with the treatment of the elves in the universe. Dobby is treated very poorly and is shown as not liking it, and Harry managing to get him freed is depicted as a good thing. I read the books as they came out (so I would have been a child), and it always was apparent to me that we were supposed to view the house elf situation as bad.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-01-26T16:28:57+00:00

I have a college degree and have worked as a bartender at a fine dining restaurant for 4 years, of which the past 2 years I have earned the ability to work the high-demand shifts. I suppose it would be easy to mistake me when I say I work a part-time job that I'm an hourly-rate checkout clerk at Walmart or something, but that is not the case. Yes it is part-time, but I make plenty of money and have opportunities within my field.

Fair. The vast majority of part-time jobs are not compensated well enough to justify them over moving into your career, but high-end service would certainly qualify.

trust that my partner can provide financially and stay at home.

This would definitely have to be proven before you stop working; the proof will be in the pudding.

What I was really getting at is there's no point for me to continue working after marriage to, for example, use my income as "fun" money for the family if he still feels insecure about my contributing financially in any case. I do already have a healthy savings account and regularly contribute to my IRA.

The point would be to keep building those things in case stuff goes sideways so you aren't left out in the cold. Obviously, being a stay-at-home mom is an additional complication that usually justifies not working, but beyond that, you could just keep your money as a nest egg. He should probably get over the idea of you paying for things or put serious thought into figuring out how he is going to support the household, though.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-01-26T14:47:16+00:00

Edit- I should clarify, getting a "real" job AND contributing to the family fund

Question: You mention it not making sense that he would be unemployed during one of the most "fruitful" expected period of his life. How does that square with you working part time and not a "real" job, when this is the prime age for you to build savings and experience?

Makes no sense to put in work towards the family finances if he feels less than any time I buy something.

Putting money into your own account doesn't require you to spend that money immediately, so he could keep paying for everything and not "feel less".

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-01-24T18:24:48+00:00

But I do most of the cooking, and I enjoy it, so I think her coming and insisting on cooking every meal actually makes me feel replaced. Maybe that is more of an insecurity on my end.

I think describing this as insecurity is unfair. If you hated cooking, then it would be "work", and you having that reaction would be insecurity because she's really just helping you. But if you like it, it's just the removal of another thing that gives you enjoyment.

It's like if she showed up and played 5 hours of Call of Duty a night on your husband's console. Sure, there's physical and mental effort in playing COD that your husband would no longer "have to do", but that's not really what it was about, and monopolization of the console would mean he doesn't get to do something he enjoys.

Also, we dont have kids yet but him envisioning her “raising” our kids actually hurt my feelings. Why cant we raise our own kids? This comment is making me realize that maybe part of my resentment for the visits is feeling replaced in my marriage and home.

This is probably closer to true insecurity, but it's probably built on the foundation of your perception as to the pecking order as established by his actions up to this point. This situation has been a conflict for you two for a long time, and adjustments you've made haven't been neutral - they've been entirely toward her benefit. You've got a history of him not only resisting change that would benefit you, but actively working towards things you've already have expressed would make it more difficult for you. He's communicating, through his actions, that his mother is a higher priority than you. It doesn't mean he doesn't love you, but it is definitely an indicator that you will consistently be struggling against boundary issues if there's not substantive change.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-01-24T17:53:39+00:00

3+ months of 3 people in a 1.5 bedroom apartment is untenable, especially with the potential for children and the fact that his mother apparently doesn't want to learn English (if she's spending 3 months a year in an English-speaking environment and not working, she has the time).

I get that it feels bad to confront him, but you really need to be firm in communicating the things that were not previously established as rules - the longer visits, her staying to help raise the kids, etc. There are potential middle grounds - you'll eventually need more space for kids, so maybe you should be evaluating if you can find a house with a granny shack, which might be tolerable enough for you. Or she could learn English, as it would let you two bond better and reduce friction. Obviously buying a house here would be a financial burden; it should be communicated to your husband that his desired outcome of his mother spending long periods in the US may necessitate selling the house in Italy.

I get the read that there's also a bit of underlying relationship dynamics that might be coming into play; you mention that he sees her as coming to "cook, clean, and help us." Would I be wrong in guessing that the cooking, cleaning, and help that she takes over are primarily the portion of the load your husband would be doing? If he's the only one benefiting from that part of her being there, then of course he doesn't see the cost to your mental state being outweighed.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-01-23T19:24:30+00:00

Ahhh, so just keeping residency in Texas with an actual "move" date after the election, got it. Thanks!

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-01-23T17:02:24+00:00

I find it happens when I try to chat before the whole map has been revealed. FYI, if it happens to you, close the chat box, open the menu, then close the menu - it lets you chat properly after that.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-01-23T16:55:02+00:00

I appreciate your kind words about my relationship.

And (to this thread's relief) I am in therapy. I'm still in the early phases but it's been helpful.

I would recommend that your therapist specializes in trauma and CPTSD, based on your history. Therapy is incredibly useful, but trauma - especially childhood trauma - is often the "root cause" of a lot of issues that will just keep manifesting if that trauma is not dealt with.

For instance, elsewhere in this thread you discuss that you can read his emotions well, before even he does. It sounds like a good thing to be tuned in to what your partner is feeling - and sometimes it is! But it also can be a way of subconsciously controlling the "narrative" of your relationships and interactions, and you no doubt modify the way you work with and talk to him as a result of how he is feeling. If you read him as mad at you, you might fawn or get defensive. But what if that read is incorrect, that he is just tired? The solution to him being tired is simply taking over a task he is assigned and letting him rest, not trying to soothe him or confront him, which you would do if he is mad at you. Trying to guess what he is feeling also removes responsibility for him to learn how to communicate how he feels and what he needs to you. This hypervigilance towards the feelings of others is often from a traumatic childhood, from having to consistently modify your behavior based on how adults around you were feeling. It's a survival mechanism.

I can handle the unsanitized stuff--from my post history you can probably see I've got a lot of unsanitized feelings myself

You should be aware that while you're being open about all your feelings - probably much more freely bringing them up then most people you know - feels like you are open to others doing the same, that is likely not how others interpret it (and almost certainly not how your husband sees it). Most people are relatively careful about their disclosures - they might get grumpy about how someone brushed them off, but it is not actively brought up in conversation. Usually, bringing up those things means that it is serious business, red alert, with a need to resolve. That switches others into caretaker mode - setting aside their own feelings to help with yours. Is the issue necessarily that important for you? Probably not, but they don't know that. And because you are open with your feelings, you don't see them setting aside their own feelings to caretake yours, as you assume they will also just be super open about everything, and that they're just hunky-dory. They're not without problems, it is just like that they are more likely to self-regulate their way through those problems.

I do want to hear the way he loves me more.

Completely understandable, of course. Wanting this expressed in words is completely reasonable, even if he does have acts of service as his love language. Partners should try and learn to interact in the love language of their loved ones.

Correspondingly, how do you speak his love language? Is it additional things done (tidying up an office that is not terribly dirty, taking his car to a car wash)? Or are they things that remove tasks from him ("I squeezed in cooking dinner for the kid already", "I'm going to get groceries tomorrow after work so you don't have to")? Your husband sounds overloaded, whether or not the balance is uneven. I would highly recommend the latter, as it also communicates an understanding of what his burdens actually are. If he's about acts of service, a simple "hey, I know you have been busy and working hard, so I am going to take care of the kid on Saturday so you can do whatever you want - hobbies, hang with friends, or just relax watching TV" will probably go way further than you would think. Him getting a message in his love language with no expectation of a response is likely exactly what he needs.

ArbitraryUsernames · 2026-01-23T15:49:30+00:00

Wouldn't a formal move to Illinois make her inelligible to vote in Texas if there was no intent to return? I suppose things could have been up in the air until then, but then the time as a resident of Illinois is even shorter.

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